Latin heluus, fuluus, flauus and their (probable) relatives

The paper discusses several etymological problems concerning Indo-European paronymic colour-words with semantic feature ‘yellow, green, orange’, preserved in Latin, Balto-Slavic and Germanic languages. The author proposes a new distribution of the words into cognates of *ghel̄- and *bhel- roots and a hypothesis of a possible labial shift in these roots. Also it is noted that Latin had a strong semantic difference between words of matte (bright) and glossy colours. So, all of these three words in question should be separated from that of *bhel(H)- like fulgor, fulmen, russ. белый, блеск, germ. *blēwaz and so on. It is supposed that this approach might be used in other difficult cases of Indo-European lexical nests.

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2025-04-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15300618
Primary Topic
Linguistics and language evolution
Type
article
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article

Latin heluus, fuluus, flauus and their (probable) relatives

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Linguistics and language evolution
article

Latin heluus, fuluus, flauus and their (probable) relatives

article en

Abstract

The paper discusses several etymological problems concerning Indo-European paronymic colour-words with semantic feature ‘yellow, green, orange’, preserved in Latin, Balto-Slavic and Germanic languages. The author proposes a new distribution of the words into cognates of *ghel̄- and *bhel- roots and a hypothesis of a possible labial shift in these roots. Also it is noted that Latin had a strong semantic difference between words of matte (bright) and glossy colours. So, all of these three words in question should be separated from that of *bhel(H)- like fulgor, fulmen, russ. белый, блеск, germ. *blēwaz and so on. It is supposed that this approach might be used in other difficult cases of Indo-European lexical nests.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
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Linguistics and language evolution
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Latin heluus, fuluus, flauus and their (probable) relatives · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS